Mejiro is 10 today
My humble jumble of PHP code I call Mejiro celebrates its 10th anniversary today. As good an occasion as any to raise a glass and get all nostalgic. Cheers!
Posts tagged with “self-hosted”
Introducing Gufo
I've decided to get filthy rich by starting my own search engine. I mean, if Google and Microsoft can pull it off, so can I, right? And like any great artist, I started with stealing forking an existing project.
So far, I've been taking the code apart to learn how it works, removing stuff I don't need, and tweaking the overall appearance to my liking. Basically, because I don't know what I'm doing most of the time, I've been pulling an Elon Musk: I'd remove a chunk of code and check if the thing still works. Despite my efforts, the thing does seem to work, so ladies and gentlemen, I give you Gufo.
Hako: Stupidly simple DIY web archiving tool
I can't code to save my life, but that doesn't stop me from trying. One of my latest creations is a case in point. Since stuff tends to disappear unceremoniously from the Web, I usually save local copies of interesting articles. Up until recently, I used the SingleFile Firefox add-on for that, but the process involved too many manual steps for my liking. After several failed attempts to make Archivebox work, I decided to roll out my own tool based on monolith. The latter a simple command-line utility that saves complete web pages as single HTML files. It took me a few hours to cobble together a crude but usable tool that I named Hako (it means box in Japanese, and it sounds a bit like hacky, which I find somewhat appropriate).
Tiny post about Tiny Page
I love Bing's daily photo feature, but I don't use Bing. So I whipped up Tiny Page, a simple landing page written in PHP. The operative word being simple. The PHP script pulls the URL of the current Bing photo and its title out of a JSON file and fetches the current weather conditions from the wttr.in service. A dash of CSS styling helps to make the page look not too terrible. That's all there is to it. Wait, actually, the page also shows whatever link you specify as favorite.
Run Pi-hole as a container with Podman
There is arguably no better way to protect devices on your local network from unwanted content than Pi-hole. Add a machine running Pi-hole to your network, and it will quietly scrub all incoming traffic from pesky stuff like ads and trackers in the background. As the name suggests, Pi-hole was initially designed to run on a Raspberry Pi. But if you already have a Linux server on your network, you can deploy a Pi-hole container on it instead. That's what I did when I replaced a QNAP NAS appliance with a ThinkPad T410 running Linux Mint. But instead of Docker, I chose to use Podman. Deploying Pi-hole on Linux Mint (and by extension, on any Ubuntu-based Linux distribution) requires a few steps, but it's not beyond the wit of man.